Students’ calcs in the 70s/80s

[Johnh]

As a university engineering lecturer in Sydney I've taught about 3000 final year students over the last 10 years or so. TBH, I've never seen any of them using a programmable calculator!

But, the smart ones get right into developing their own spreadsheets (they all have MS office provided free), or coding with C or Python etc.

When you take a problem apart and understand it to a point where you can code it into some computational device, you really get to understand it. And when we were students in the 70's and 80's, the programmables were all we had, and my smart nerdy students today, with their laptops etc, are really the same kids that we were then.